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Wednesday, 19 April 2017

Does neuroscience promise to make us super-humans?

What
does it take to master a skill? Helsen et al. (1998) suggested that for an
athlete to reach a world-class level of performance at least 4000 hours need to
be invested into deliberate practice. Ericsson (1990) takes it even further
than that by putting forward a figure of 10000 hours (20 hours x 50 weeks /
year x 10 years) to master any kind of skill.

We’re
going to leave the question of how a person’s body changes with the skill
acquisition for the purposes of this post and look deeper into what happens to
a person’s brain. Beilock (2011) hypothesized that as a person moves along the
stages of skill mastering from being a novice to becoming an expert, the
skill-related knowledge is gradually migrating from working memory localized in
a pre-frontal cortex to procedural memory occupying sensorimotor regions. In
fact, existing neuroscience research reveals strong evidence for
neuroplasticity caused by the deliberate practice. It is now evident that wide
structural and physiological changes are happening in both abovementioned areas
when extensive training is applied (see, for example, Draganski et al., 2004).

This
early research is raising a lot of exciting questions. Can we use our knowledge
about neural mechanisms and alterations happening in a brain with skill
development to inform training strategies? Knowing the capacity and speed of
the brain matter changing with training, can we predict future world-class
athletes, musicians and chess masters? Could we potentially replicate the
neural structure changes of a skillful person? Or nudge those changes in the
brain to happen faster?

Neuroscience
researchers have meanwhile been making some progress to offer answers to some
of these questions. Thus investigators from HRL's Information & System
Sciences Laboratory discovered that
applying low-current electrical brain stimulation can facilitate and accelerate
learning new skills. "We measured the brain activity patterns of six
commercial and military pilots, and then transmitted these patterns into novice
subjects as they learned to pilot an airplane in a realistic flight
simulator," says Dr. Matthew Phillips from HRL team.

Even
though it does sound like a storyline of a sci-fi movie about the future,
several companies, such as Kernel and Elon
Musk’s Neuralink have been
reported to invest into creating brain-computer interfaces that among other
things “may one day upload and download” information directly into and out of a
human brain.

If
and when this becomes a reality, may be we can learn how to ride a bike a
matter of minutes?